never more american

Let me be clear, at least to start. I love living here. I love that it’s difficult and complex and that a day never goes by without me learning something. But sometimes, the battling for these lessons makes me tired. And I am indeed, right now, so tired of being tired. Some experiences lately have reminded me of my split personality and how I always feel a little bit in between. I can’t help but feel skeptical of the Westerner who comes to African and proclaims that she is fully home. In some ways, I am. In others, I never will be. The differences between Rachel and Rahele (what Lozi speakers here call me) remain profound. A small illustration:

Rachel: A cousin of my sister Daisy’s husband decided to come for a visit. She didn’t ask, nor was she invited. She just packed her bags and put herself in Daisy’s car last weekend when she was coming back from Vic Falls. Ellen has been here for a week and shows no signs of leaving. Every day, she goes shopping, buying clothes, shoes, an umbrella for the sun, and whatever else. And comes back here, eating and drinking from our kitchen, fanning herself and throwing suffering glances around until someone switches on a fan, painfully forcing herself to eat the mostly vegetarian food we cook in this house. Literally, last night, sooooo slloooooowly, she forked up one agonized kidney bean at a time. After a few days she started to do the dishes and saying thank you for random things like tea. After Daisy told her she should. She has not so much as brought home a loaf of bread to share, but just sits, waits, naps, and moans about the heat. She doesn’t participate in conversations, try to get to know anyone, or do anything but bring a brooding presence to a small house. She just turns the radio on and sits ands stares while I am trying to work. No, I take that back, last night she was reading her Bible. Culturally speaking, Daisy can’t ask her to leave for fear of angering her husband’s family. But I keep thinking, I could ask her. I’m an ass of an American anyway.

Rahele: Reality in Zimbabwe, from where Ellen is coming, is pretty grim for most people right now. Prices spiral upwards every day, and a few weeks back the government re-issued all of its currency with three zeroes removed. Yeah. So shopping here, even as far from the capital as you can get in Namibia, seems comparatively cheap. Living under a regime like Mugabe’s, where ministers are once again tossing around outlawing meetings of the opposition, has got to be a nightmare. The guy has ordered orphanages to be bulldozed, for the love of God. I never thought of Katima as a paradise before, but in some ways it is. And being in a relative’s house, Ellen probably thought she knew what to expect from the cuisine. A meat-and-cornmeal-porridge-heavy table is the cultural norm, but we rarely make either one here. I wonder what fresh vegetables cost in Zimbabwe. For that matter, I wonder how many people can even get fresh vegetables in Zimbabwe. On any given night there at now at least four people here for dinner anyway, so it’s not as if it actually makes any difference to cook some more food. And even if it did, I would do it anyway, because to come here under these circumstances cannot be the most enjoyable thing. She’s quiet and sleeps a lot. What’s the difference anyway? If we can offer her a break, we should.

I swing back and forth between these two, feeling like they are both honest but also each perhaps a bit incomplete on its own. Mostly I realize how much I have changed, and continue to change. I really am a professional nerd, having these reactions but also watching myself have them, picking them apart and wondering how it is that they always seem to knit back together in a slightly different way.

unintentional research

“Rachel, doesn’t your husband get angry with you, spending so much time out here with us?” queried Rosemary.

I paused, smiled. “What husband would that be?”

“You aren’t MARRIED?” several women asked incredulously.

“No,” I replied. “I prefer to do what I think is important to me.”

“Well, but you MUST have CHILDREN,” came next among the murmurs.

“No children, not for me,” I replied.

Trying to puzzle it out, they looked at me. “But you are beautiful,” Rosemary stated, dragging out the beautiful like it was truer because of taking longer to pronounce. And as if being beautiful made sex and pregnancy inevitable.

It was all I could do not to break out laughing, but I didn’t have quite enough time. “How old are you?” someone piped up from the back.

This is my favorite inevitable question. “How old do you THINK I am?” I returned.

Quiet guesses, speculation bubbled up in discussion. Consensus rested around 24-25.

This time I did laugh. “I’m 33.”

“AH! But then you should have at least six kids! I’m 44 and I have ten!” came the assertion from one of the women sitting across from me. There was a lot of nodding in agreement. I think my uterus might have spasmed in horror at the thought.

I turned to the instigator. “Rosemary, how many kids do YOU have?”

“Two,” she stated, somewhat sadly. “But I want ten.” She emphasized the ten with a definitive certainty.

“Why ten?” I asked.

A glimpse of reality smacked me through her words. “One to fetch water, one to tend the garden, one to wash the laundry, one to look after the littler ones, one to cook, one to clean the courtyard, one to watch the goats…and a few to take care of me when I get AIDS and get sick and die,” she replied. It was as if she was telling me how to add two and two and get four. And sucking the air out of me in the process.

The prevalence rates for HIV in the Caprivi are 47.8% for people over the age of 25. Forty-seven point eight percent. Even the methodological arguments I have with the study that shows this are hardly enough to salve the feeling of creeping horror that comes in, walking around up here, looking at every other person. Every other person.

I’ve started doing some small quizzes in workshops to test local knowledge of HIV. Because if you listen to Bill Gates and lots of other do-gooders trying to fight HIV in Africa, you’d think it was simple. If people just KNEW and if condoms were easily available, a big part of the fight would be won. I wonder if this is really true. So in my own small way, I’ve started trying to find out.

The first time I tested this idea was at a two-day training on HIV for conservancy committee representatives. Their first responsibility might be conservation of natural resources, but around here you can’t really NOT talk about HIV. Sitting with the coordinator of women’s issues for the local conservation organization – marginality of these issues fully apparent – I floated a quick idea. “Why don’t we give them a quick quiz now to see what they know, and then repeat it after the workshop to see what changes?”

We handed out small sheets of paper to be filled out anonymously and ten questions were read out about HIV. Most of them were true or false, like, condoms prevent the spread of HIV. Things that, in my view, would be enough to protect yourself if you could answer them (and act on them) correctly.

I graded them, and later, we talked about the answers people had given. And the thing is, they were mostly right. Granted, I had to explain – welcome to a crash course in educational epidemiology – how an HIV-positive couple could have an HIV-free baby, but I think I managed well enough. Being me, though, I couldn’t help myself.

“It looks to me like we all pretty much know about condoms,” I stood up and said, in a workshop whose purpose was, in large part, to teach people how to use both male and female condoms. Complete with a dildo, a plastic vagina, and demonstrations. “So why don’t we use them?”

I’d taken a flyer, not expecting anyone to say much of anything. But a young man responded quickly. “Sometimes you see a beautiful woman, you want to make sex with her right away and get her pregnant so she won’t leave you,” he stated. Echoes of the certain feeling of two plus two equals four jingled in the space between us. I was stunned.

People laughed a little. They offered other localized explanations. Rumors circulated about condoms – they had worms, the lubrication on them wasn’t good, it sticks to your skin (someone told me this but I’ve never tired so I’m not sure). We don’t like to eat a sweet that’s wrapped in plastic, someone said. Women don’t feel anything when you have sex with a condom, a man told me. And how many of you are mostly concerned about what she’s feeling, I wanted so badly to ask.

The next time I ran the quiz, it was with a group made entirely of women. And the follow-up conversation shifted a great deal. It went from, “we don’t like…” to “the men don’t like…” Which made it that much more easy to realize that it wasn’t about knowledge, but power. Power to choose when to have sex, and with whom, and how. The women I sat with that day – even those who are illiterate – know about how a condom is supposed to work. They get it. They just do not have the ability to choose to use them, even if they understand. But they are curious and soon turned the tables on me, with fountains of questions that I answered simply and clearly. Did it matter? I have no idea.

The other side of this, however, is babies. Having children is one of the most important signs of culturally appropriate behavior one can offer. This is why so many of the women I work with are shocked at my childlessness. Because you can be poor, you can be unemployed, your husband or boyfriend can beat you, but you can have a baby strapped to your back. Without one, you are no one. A friend of mine recently reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver’s observation in “The Poisonwood Bible,” that babies are the only new thing anyone ever sees around here. An exaggeration in an area increasingly flooded with new shoes from China, perhaps, but an apt one nonetheless. So even women who are HIV-positive and get on treatment, well, the first thing they do when their viral loads drop is have a baby.

Which brings me back to Rosemary. HIV is increasingly seen as inevitable. You have to have sex, to have babies, to survive, to manage the labor of daily life, so that you can have someone to look after you while you die. A professor of mine in grad school once talked about how culture has the tendency to turn back in on itself, to distort itself into consequences that are perhaps unintended but no less problematic. And nowhere else has this been more clear than in these past months here in the Caprivi.

spiders, every day

Recently I came across one of those lists of funny facts about what happens to the average person over the course of a lifetime. Included was the statistic that we probably swallow an average of eight spiders per person, per lifetime, while sleeping. Last night when I went to bed I looked at the walls in my bedroom, littered with a growing number of the big flat spiders that my boss refers to as “not-so-bads.” And I practically laughed out loud, thinking, I’m pretty sure I’ve already exceeded the average on this score.

Spiders are a relatively mundane part of life here. And in thinking about them, I thought also about the ways in which I tend to describe living here. It’s not all big mammals and dramatic realizations, though these things of course tend to make for better stories to email home. But perhaps, an average day would also shed light on what it’s like to live here. Let me walk you through one from this past week in Maun.

WEDNESDAY
4-5am: Start waking up. Already, still, hot in the room. Ceiling fan not really helping. Roll over and try to go back to sleep. Wake up, roll over, try to go back to sleep again. Parsley, the cat, stretches out on my back and purrs.
6am: Lose the battle and get up. Feed my boss’ cats, as he’s away in Cape Town or Canada or Delft or I’m-not-sure-where. Open the window so Parsley can get out and I shut off the outside lights, which I leave on all night. In a house that has been broken into twice this year, and which is semi-famous for housing a writer who was raped here and a Member of Parliament who shot a thief here, it seems like a good idea. Shower in cold water, make coffee to bring along to work, put on CNN to kill time. Yes, CNN.
7:45: Call my friend Monica to ask about when she thinks she’s leaving, so I know when she might pick me up. “I’m having my rice cakes and jam and so I’ll be on my way in ten minutes,” she says. I lock up and start walking down the sand track towards the tarred road to minimize how far she has to drive to pick me up. Yesterday we went to the gym in town together early-early and had breakfast at a local place that bakes its own bread and muffins. Lovely.
8:24: Arrive at work. Look for cleaning staff to let me into my boss’ office, which is where I sit though I don’t have keys. This takes anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes.
8:30: Coffee, email (we have a satellite connection)… what do I have to do today?
9:00: Literature search on the environmental legacies of apartheid. Reading articles, making lists of things to get thru interlibrary loan. Wow, this feels like the US.
10:00: Meet with the director of the centre about some projects I’m working on with the University of Florida. Not the first person to do so, he expresses some discontent with the amount of time my boss is away. Makes me feel in an awkward spot, but substantively we have a good chat and he is very supportive of my research agenda.
10:55: Research…reading…sometimes, someone stops by to say hi and I’m reminded that the entire world is not, in fact, electronic.
1:00: Lunch. Otherwise known as, leftovers at my desk.
1:12: Back to research. And email. Having been away for the past three weeks, I owe a lot of email. A LOT of email. Also still looking for articles online. Can’t get that, or that, or that. Order a paper copy of an article to be mailed from the US and hope it will arrive in time to be useful. Hope it will arrive at all.
3:10: Break down and switch on the air conditioning for a little while. Eeesh, it’s hot, and brick buildings were not invented in (or for) southern Africa.
5:28: Work day over. I head home with Monica and we stop at my (boss’) place to pick up the things I need to cook for her and her partner, as promised.
5:55: Start making squash and carrot curry, yellow dal, and rice seasoned with peppercorns, cinnamon, and cloves for Monica, Christiana, and their friend Elena. Try not to get into argument with Elena, a recently returned to Maun American, about the significance of reality TV and the meaning (her definition) of “trash” in culturally specific, judgmental terms. Figure, better to drink my gin and tonic and cook.
6:20: G&T number two. Elena is telling stories about her recent trip to the US and I focus on cooking. Better to not get in trouble, I think.
7:10: Food is pretty much ready, but Monica is on the phone with the friend who looks after their house outside of Harare. He’s been trying to email, but computer viruses, after all, respect no national boundaries.
8:00: We eat outside, enjoying the breeze and the smell of the spices and the wine. We talk about our families, about explaining why and how we live here. Christiana’s mother died earlier this year and she talks about the emotional shifting that comes with losing a parent. Elena’s parents sound sophisticated and artistic, and I feel a little provincial. Which to be honest, I enjoy.
9:05: Strawberries and cream, with a side of dark Swiss chocolate I brought for Monica and Christiana from the duty-free shop in the Johannesburg airport. The air is cool, the company thoughtful and engaging, my head is spinning.
9:40: Monica’s a little looped, so Christiana drives me home. She waits at the gate for me to walk up the drive, until she sees lights inside go on. The house feels empty, cavernous, sweaty. Crazy the cat greets me outside, mewing loudly and insisting on something that only he understands. “I fed you already, little turd,” I remind him, slurring just a tiny bit. Inside, Parsley jumps quietly into bed with me and I sleep.

Thursday, we had an open house of sorts for the local safari company guys. But that’s another story entirely.

drought, poor people, and mutilated movies

A few weeks ago, I reread Norman Rush’s book about whites in Botswana. It’s called, well, “Whites.” Considering that I hadn’t lived in Botswana the first time I’d read it, I wondered if I’d look at it differently now. It’s safe to say it struck me harder this time. In particular, an exchange between two expat Americans stuck in my head:

“Answer this question. Do you like it in Africa?”

She said she did.

“But you can’t quite figure out why you like it, am I right?” he asked. “Because, I mean, hell, it’s inconvenient. Gaborone is dead at night, the movies are ancient and all mutilated because they have to come through South African censorship because that’s where the distributor is located. But still we like it here. Drought, poor people…even when they get a decent movie, they mix up the reels. We want to be here anyway, but we can’t figure out why. Except that one night I figured it out. It’s because it isn’t our country and we can’t help what happens. We can offer eople advice and we get paid for it. We get good vacations, we eat off the top of the food chain, we get free housing. Hey!, but we’re not responsible for what happens if Africa goes to hell, ecause we’ve done our best. Also, at the same time, we’re not responsible for what happens in America either, really – because hey!, we weren’t home when it happened. Say we get fifteen percent compliance on birth control here, which is what we do get and which is terrific by Third World standards. O.K., it’s not enough. But what can we do, we tried. We told them. But we’re too late. We all know it, but somebody pays us to keep up the good work, so we say fine. Why am I telling you this? I forget."

Certainly, I forget too. But what lingers is this idea of responsibility. I thought to myself, if Rush had asked me why I’m here, I suspect I’d have said just the opposite. I’m here because I do feel responsible. Not the kind of responsibility that makes the state of affairs my fault – I’m not so arrogant as that. But the kind that says, I’m a human being, I’ve had a lot of privilege, and I have a responsibility to do something with it that might hopefully help someone other than me. The kind of naïve, idealistic responsibility that makes it possible for me to get out of bed every day in a region of Namibia where nearly half of the population is HIV-positive and where some women still think they can’t even talk to me without their husbands being present. I’ve seen a lot of things, living here. Things that no one should ever have to see, much less live through. And despair is a constant undercurrent. But the idea that I’ve come here to escape responsibility, well, it’s absurd. And probably a little bit right.

After all, I can go home. I can leave whenever I want. I even have a fantastic job waiting for me in a place that I am sure will be good for me. I’m working with a Zimbabwean academic who is now based in the US, who reminded me that “we can’t change things here.” We. Can’t. And he’s right. But he’s also wrong. I hope.

the view from here

A while back - and by this I mean, a few years ago - a colleague started a conversation about 'Africa' with me by asking, "What does it LOOK like where you live?" Knowing this individual well enough, I could see that she had been thinking for weeks about how to ask the right, most intelligent question about a part of the world that was totally unfamiliar to her. And now, knowing my own tendency to write long, carefully crafted missives rather than brief updates, I see that this is probably in fact a good question. So I thought I would share a few images.

Going up into the Delta, July 2006 (the water is, in fact, quite cold in winter)

MaSubia Cultural Festival, Bukalo Kuta south of Katima Mulilo, Caprivi Strip, Namibia

Grass basket wrapped with palm leaf strips

Ballot counting for a new management in Kwandu Conservancy, also in the Caprivi Strip

My tent inside my research assistant's courtyard in Choi village, Caprivi (one of my study sites)

My friends Rosemary's daughter doing her best to make off with my sunglasses at the annual Ngoma Market Crafts Festival, Caprivi

tea from the river

“Try!” she said, grinning at me and reaching for my hand. I scooted over next to her on the reed mat and pulled up the right leg of my pants to reveal a bare surface on which to roll the fibers. She took my soft academic’s hands in her callused palms and twirled the golden-pale threads smoothly underneath her fingers, pushing them down towards my ankle and pulling them back up to my knee. The wispy strands curled together, spiraling and thickening into a twist that she pulled to the left. Separate the two bunches, hold the twist in your left hand, roll the split-in-two end with your right, pull to the left, repeat. Moisten with some water (or spit) if they get too frayed, and continue. I spun a short section, perhaps a foot long, and she inspected my work. With bubbles of laughter Rosemary nodded her approval and held up the strand for others to inspect. I passed.

Spinning string went better than crocheting it into a small purse-sized bag to be sold at the craft market. Another woman held out a few inches of dense stitches for me to continue with, and I did try – but she took it back within moments. Loose African conceptions of time notwithstanding, it was still not to be wasted in this way. It was my turn to laugh. Which was good practice, because it was certainly not the last time I would appear foolish in the course of a week-long crocheting workshop.

IRDNC (Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation) is the organization I work with here in Namibia, where I’ve landed to do some research for about six weeks. I’m just across the border from Botswana, and I hope to spend a lot of time working on both sides of this boundary, considering everything from the local effects of wildlife migration to women’s participation in conservation. I’ve been here before – four years ago when I started fieldwork for my dissertation – and I’ve been fortunate enough to be welcomed back by many of the people who helped me then. The primary difference is that now, I have a bit more to offer than a green, wide-eyed grad student intent on Africa but needing some time to really stand on her own two feet.

Simply put, IRDNC focuses on supporting local groups in ways that are sustainable. For example, this means that they try to fund training (like craft workshops) and pay for things that have one-off costs (like a fridge from which to sell cool drinks), rather than encouraging reliance on something regular that will just disappear if and when IRDNC itself goes away. This, in most ways, makes sense. But having just spent a week talking to women who can’t get access to the palm leaves they need to make (and sell) baskets because IRDNC doesn’t drive them to harvest it any more, it makes me wonder. Would I refuse to feed a hungry friend tonight because I know I’ll be out of food tomorrow? Would I refuse to help a kid pay school fees for her last year of high school because I knew I couldn’t send her to college? I hope not.

I suggested we talk about the problem as a group and try to come up with ways to address it. Though it isn’t a new issue, it remains a sore one. The first comment went along the lines of, there’s nothing we can do. One of the women added that they had planted a palm garden and it didn’t work, so they failed and that was just it. Being me, I couldn’t resist. “So, that’s the end. No one will ever collect palm or make a basket again.” A few women snickered, but the gardener was pretty annoyed with me. I didn’t really mind. Finally, a few possibilities came out – but only from those who work for IRDNC. It will, like most things here, take time to see if any of these ideas take shape.

In the sustainability game, local capacity is more and more important, even as it develops more and more incrementally. I found myself listening to woman after woman saying the same thing and thinking, well, I know this isn’t a long-term solution, but I bet I can get hold of a truck, pick them up, drive them to Chefuzwe, pay for the forestry permits, help them harvest the leaves, and drop them at home for not much more than what I’d spend on a good pizza and a six pack of beer at home. And no, it’s not sustainable. But it has to be better than nothing. So I’m torn between a desire to just do something, and the need to stay within the framework that my colleagues here emphasize. The small bits of money that women make from selling crafts seem inconsequential compared to the funds that come in from trophy hunting, but they are used in ways that spread benefits around. Nearly every woman I spoke with said she pays for school fees and uniforms for her kids out of her craft income. A woman named Salina told me that she’s been selling crafts for ten years, and her daughter is about to finish high school because she’s been able to pay for her education during just the right time. So when donors argue that craft isn’t sustainable because women don’t make enough money, I beg to differ. Or at least, the next paper I write will tell a deeper story.

The week I spent camped out behind the craft market, however, was peppered with other moments that stick and ask for further thought just as sustainability does. A German couple making a documentary stopped by two days after they said they were coming to film the women in action. So in welcoming form, the women got up to dance and sing for them. “I don’t want them dancing!” sputtered the cameraman. Apparently they had about half an hour to waste with us before moving on to more important things, and he wanted the women to sit and crochet, singing softly as they often do. I had more than half a mind to suggest he might be better off taping a circus if he wanted stereotypical images of trained local wildlife that would fulfill his need for images that everyone expected to see on the screen. Instead, I sucked in a breath that didn’t help and said, “Just let them be for a few minutes, they’ve been sitting and working all week.” After a few songs I asked them to show the crew what they were working on, and they sat on their mats and picked up their stitches, voices rising softly together as they’d been doing before the camera intruded. Once again I’d felt like I was pushed into the middle, and there I sat – liking my own actions less and less, layering them over with my extensive training in justifying and qualifying.

Without running water, we had to rely on someone going past in a truck to make a daily trip to the river with plastic jerrycans to fill so that we could drink hot tea in the morning and cook porridge at night. Bathing, to me, was out of the question. Some of the women running things, however, were of another mind. Every day they heated water and disappeared behind a reed screen to wash up. If I wanted to have a shower, Joyce kept telling me, she could escort me in my little borrowed car to a campground and talk to the staff there. I said no, I was all right. It wasn’t so hot, I added, and I didn’t mind. Her disbelief was almost comical. At first I thought maybe she was trying to tell me something about how I smelled (and, probably, rightly so). But I think it was more a matter of having different standards for what constitutes ‘important’ under these circumstances. Cleanliness is important here, with or without running water. I just couldn’t bring myself to get in my car and drive to a campground to shower when there were fifteen women sitting on the dusty ground crocheting for twelve hours a day to make the equivalent of less than five dollars by the end of the week who had no shower in sight even when they went home. It seemed unfair. There was a pink bathtub waiting for me in my sister’s house when I got back to Katima on Friday, and that was already more than enough.

workin'...i think...

For some reason which remains unclear, my contract was mailed to Canada instead of the US. So I arrived here without paperwork, other than a faxed copy of my offer letter. The director of the research centre decided that we could sort this out in Maun – that the main campus, 1000 kilometers away in the capital of Gaborone, could just send a replacement and we could sign and seal everything via DHL. But when more than two weeks had gone by and I was still not official, plans changed.

“I think you must go to Gaborone,” Dudley, our centre administrator, announced to me. This is, of course, what he’d said several weeks before. Too bad he was right then too. Of course even this required a few more days and a long weekend to pass before a time for me to arrive could be agreed upon…which turned out to be, “She can come any time!”

So Karuu, our secretary, asked me when I could go. “Tomorrow,” I said, ready for this to get sorted. So she booked me a flight.

“But it’s only a one way ticket because when you sign your contract they must pay on that side for you to report here,” she explained. This ‘rationale’ was vaguely discomfiting but, as with most things here, it wasn’t up to me.

The next day – a Wednesday – I arrived at my office here in Maun ready to be driven to the airport. “They are thinking maybe you need to postpone until tomorrow,” Karuu stated. “The lady who arranges accommodation is not around, and if you pay yourself, they might not like where you stay, and they might not reimburse you.” She went on about people I needed to see, how much I had to do when I got there, whether there would be enough time, if I got stuck for the weekend…and I lost track of the logic somewhere. Which is easy to do in rural Africa.

“Ok,” I said, stopping her. “Is the problem that they can’t find a hotel for me in the next EIGHT hours anywhere in the city, or that the person I need to see when I get there, won’t BE there?” I was trying to create categories of problems – mostly, ‘things I can fix’ and ‘forget it.’ Such categories compare in size, of course, like puddles and oceans.

In the end it appeared to be a paperwork and purchase requisition problem in paying for a hotel. So I called a friend and asked if I could stay with her, and she was glad to say yes. I informed Karuu that I was going anyway. I should have seen that this was a bad sign.

About five minutes before I was to leave, she entered my office. My contracts and appointment letters had arrived from Gabs. Seriously. After almost three weeks, they showed up as I was on my way down. Now of course, if they had not, I’d have had even bigger problems when I arrived. But no one here was even sure they’d been sent. I should have recognized this, too, as a bad sign.

One quick flight and a shorter taxi ride later, I arrived at the University of Botswana’a main campus. I found the office of Ms. B. Mothlabani, who represented my starting point. We introduced ourselves, holding out our right hands with the left lightly resting under our right elbows as a sign of respect. Straight away, she asked if I had brought my contract. Thanks to any and all deities that Karuu had checked the mail before I left, I thought silently. I signed the contracts I’d brought and she watched. She then assigned a tall, well-dressed woman in dreadlocks and spiky heeled-and-toed Italian leather shoes to walk me over to Mr. Modise’s office. “I don’t know how you walk around in those shoes, mma,” I said to her, smiling. “They make my feet hurt just looking at them!”“You have to practice,” she said quite earnestly. “You will get used to it.”

She glanced down sideways at the only pair of ‘dress’ shoes I brought to Botswana – chunky, rounded black clogs that are already well-worn. And worse – for someone who lives in the city – they were dusty from kicking around in the Kalahari sands of Maun.

“Maybe you are just not interested,” she said. But the way she said it suggested no doubt on her part; it was quietly authoritative statement made like she was diagnosing the terminally pathetic state of my footwear.

I laughed. “It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it?”

Mr. Modise signed my contracts on behalf of the university. But they would not be official until I’d had a medical exam as a condition of employment. Which I had already done, in Maun. But the report was not on the right form. My doctor in Maun had essentially just written me a note saying I was in good health and, after reviewing my chest x-ray, did not have TB. This would not do.

“There is a form, with more detailed information, that we must have, and the doctor just across the street knows this, you must go there,” Mr. Modise droned. “We are being audited now and they could ask me for your file, and for this form, and if it is not there...” And on and on. I gave up and with directions from his secretary, proceeded ‘across the street.’ Which was, of course, not across the street. Having been told to ‘go straight’ meant cut through the soccer pitch to the main road about a block to the left, and then turn right onto that road. The ‘second street to the left’ meant the fifth, and ‘not past the Gaborone Sun Hotel’ meant right across from it.

When I arrived there was a problem with the date on the report from my doctor in Maun. It was January. And apparently I should have been carrying my chest x-ray around. The funny thing about that was, it has actually occurred to me that I should bring it. I hadn’t.

The doctor was gentle and soft-spoken, with a degree from the University of Lagos and a vaguely French-laced accent. He was much more thorough, checking my blood pressure twice. “It’s a bit high,” he told me after the second time. “Have you ever had high blood pressure?”

“No,” I replied, “and it was fine ten days ago at my exam in Maun.” I thought about being here for three weeks with no sign of clear status, about the effort to change my trip that morning, about being told I had to go to another doctor, about dragging my backpack and briefcase around in the midday sun to find the place, about being told I should be carrying a chest x-ray around with me. And then I thought about every university bureaucrat who handled my file having access to my blood pressure. Eish.

Tromping back down the dusty, uneven, brick-chunked path at the side of a four-lane road to the university, I resented the drop of sweat trickling down the curve at the small of my back. I resented that no one had even offered to keep my bag in an office for me while I ran around. Mostly I resented not the rules, but the fact that I could never seem to figure out what they were until I’d already broken them. But I had to admit that the situation was becoming more comical by the second as I dodged traffic to cross back to the Administration Building.

Mr. Modise’s secretary, Thaba, sent me away. “It’s too late now for anything else,” she pronounced. It was all of 4:10pm. I had to have an employee ID number to move ahead any further, and apparently the chap with the ability to give me one was, well, I don’t know where he was. That wasn’t the point. The point was, it’s 4:10. I did manage to pay 20 pula for my faculty ID to the cashier. But I couldn’t actually GET an ID yet because, well, I didn’t have an ID number.

“When should I come back in the morning?” I queried, sincerely hoping that one more day would do it and I could get home on Friday.

“We start at quarter to eight,” she replied.

“Seven forty-five?” I confirmed.
“Yes,” she said. “So you should come at about nine.”

I don’t particularly care for using the words ‘need’ and ‘gin’ in the same sentence. But there are times when the quinine in tonic water truly is medicinal. Or better, perhaps, therapeutic. I had three at the bar of a posh hotel that night, one for each friend with whom I shared dinner and watched France beat Portugal on a penalty shot. “Yeah, it is kinda too bad to win on a penalty shot,” Robert agreed with me. Robert is a wind-up toy of a GIS expert whose research in the Kalahari never fails to excite him. His energy flashed on memories of mine while doing my first fieldwork in Africa. It was refreshing to be reminded that one can, in fact, maintain such adoration for technical subject matter over time.

The next morning I returned to Ms. Mothlabani at eight o’clock, saving Thaba for her appointed hour of nine. And she spent the whole hour circling the point while the heater above her computer whirred.

I started out with good news. “I just wanted to let you know that I don’t need a place to stay tonight either. I can stay with my friend again,” I informed her.

“Now THAT is a relief!” she sighed, leaving me wondering if anyone had ever come to main campus from out of town before. But unfortunately we then proceeded to the small matter of my return ticket to Maun.

“Why did they do THAT?” she asked me, exasperated already when I told her that my centre had only booked me a one-way ticket. “We can’t do it here in just ONE DAY! I think maybe even up there in Maun they are not following the procedure! To buy a ticket we have to get three quotes from three different travel agents. Then there is a competition and one is selected. Then we have to get all the approvals and signatures for a purchase order. Then we can pay so the tickets can be issued…”

I was primed to cut my losses. “So, if I pay for it, can you reimburse me?”

“Oh yes, that is MUCH easier.”

Maybe for you, I thought, knowing that I should have realized I was going to end up eating at least some of the costs of this trip. Nothing like paying to be employed.

She made the call and I spoke to a travel agent. I’d have to pay and pick up the ticket in person. The agency was “not far,” Ms. Mothlabani assured me, but she wished I had a car. When I asked if I could walk, she looked at me like I’d lost it. Even though she said it was less than 2 kilometers away. She gave me directions and I wrote them down as if they meant something, tucking them into my pocket for later. I did make sure I had the agency’s phone number.

We moved on to reimbursement for the ticket I’d bought to get here from Chicago. In addition to the printed itinerary and receipt, she wanted the unused part of the ticket. I didn’t want to give it up, as I’ve got designs on a grand trip to San Francisco and Boston in November which require the use of this particular ticket. I made the outrageous suggestion of photocopies but she clipped the originals to the paperwork anyway.

Then, however, she handed the packet to me. “Take this to Mr. Modise and he will sign it. After that you can take it to the cashier and ask how long it will take for a check,” she instructed.

I walked out. It was just about nine anyway. And on my way, I removed my return ticket from the wad of papers she’d handed me. Must have gotten lost in my bag, I thought, stuffing it between a couple of books.

Thaba seemed irritated with me already. She told me to sit. Then she proceeded to ignore me completely for at least five minutes. Not a word. Finally she informed me that the gentleman who had to put me into the computer system had not yet done so. Then she ignored me for another ten minutes. She had managed to take the reimbursement papers into Mr. Modise’s office. I wondered if I would ever see them again. I wondered how much I cared. I sat quietly and tried to shrink into the chair.

Mr. Employee ID called. He didn’t have my passport number, which he needed to finish uploading me into the system. Could I come over with it, sure. But, over where? Thaba’s seeping disapproval made me feel like I’d violated the secret code no one had taught me. Except that the employee information form I’d filled out the day before hadn’t asked for my passport number. Neither had anyone with whom I’d spoken. In fact, I could have been anyone. Hell, Ms. Mothlabani’s shock at my appearance in her doorway the day before was explained only with, “I thought that DeMotts was a man!!”

The morning dragged on mercilessly:
Can I please have my copy of my contract? (eventually)
Is the ID machine working? (I’d heard it was down)
Don’t I need a copy of the acceptance letter too? (making a copy will take time…)
Don’t I need to fill out Medical Aid forms? (yes, go where you were this morning)
Where do I go to get my ID? (let me show you…aka, not where I was sent)
Is the machine working? (it was)
I don’t WANT to go to immigration here, I want to do it in Maun. (where I can pester them every day until it’s sorted)

The woman who took my picture for the ID giggled at it on the screen. “I think you must smile like this all of the time,” she beamed. I looked like a bit of a smirking dork, but I suppose she was right nonetheless.

I went back to Thaba’s office for at least the tenth time. “Is there ANYTHING else I should be doing?” I asked. Somehow it was only approaching noon.

“I don’t think so,” she said for at least the tenth time. I chose to ask about the reimbursement paperwork. “Ah yes, Mr. Modise has sent that back to Ms. Mothlabani, you will have to go to her about that.”

Not good news. Suddenly I wondered if my removal of the plane tickets had gotten poor Ms. Mothlabani in trouble for submitting something that was incomplete. I felt terrible. It was not a receipt, and shouldn’t be needed, but logic was so far beyond the point that I could no longer define it anyway.

I walked slowly back over to her office. Do I lie a little, I pondered, or a lot. I had a good half an hour to think it over while I waited for her to be available. I squatted in the hallway outside her office and stared. Someone asked me if I was all right. I don’t think I answered very politely.

I would be surprised when she commented on the absence of the ticket, surely. Maybe it fell out in my bag! Oh here it is! I also thought about the hard line. Hey, I gave it to you. I have no idea where it is. Maybe that was better. I couldn’t decide.

In the end it didn’t matter. The problem had nothing to do with the missing ticket. The problem was that I had not officially accepted the university’s offer of employment BEFORE I flew to Botswana to begin work. Because they sent my contract to Canada and consequently, I had not signed it before I got on the plane.

This conversation spun even more pointlessly than any other. Until the next one, with Mr. Modise himself, in which he admitted that there are things they might pursue “internally” to see about the problem of wrong addresses on contracts. But about the money, his hands were tied until he met with his boss. So they finished with me by creating the distinct possibility that I will lose the $1600 I spent to get here.

Thaba thanked me for being so patient as I slung my bag over my shoulder and turned to go. I almost laughed out loud. The irony was, of course, that to a large extent I had won. I had a contract, an ID, medical insurance. But at every turn I felt like it cost me an increasingly painful piece of my hide.

I started walking down the street in the direction of the travel agency to pick up my plane ticket. But at some point, as I ambled along the low brick wall of the university’s edge, I reminded myself that ‘far’ and ‘not far’ were almost obscenely relative. Maybe I’d better call, I thought, once I’d been walking for a while. No answer. Shocking.

Concrete squares stuck out from the lower edge of the bricks, and I seated myself on one of them in the shade. Cars zoomed by, beeping minibuses that always seem to have one wheel lower than the other three, beat-up Toyota sedans with several hundred thousand k’s on them, Land Rovers outfitted for safaris, a slablike truck with men in cobalt overalls spilling out of its bed. I pulled out a cigarette, there at the corner of Jawara Road and Mobutu Drive, and lit it. I only have an occasional smoke when I drink, but there I was – a thickly rounded white girl sitting just above the tawny dust of roadside midday foot traffic, pulling on a Chesterfield and watching Gabs go by. At some point, I noticed that the lights in the intersection sometimes glowed red and yellow at the same time. Good thing I’m not driving, I thought.

The concrete was cool against my thighs. I leaned back to enjoy my cigarette, or at least the mildly disorienting buzz it delivered.

I finally got through to the travel agency on my cell. It was indeed further than I’d hoped so I postponed until Ase, whose couch I’d be gracing again later, could give me a lift. I thought I needed a better last interaction with UB so I walked back to campus and found the library. I’d been hoping to locate a couple of books on resettlement to help with an article I’m working on. I had an ID, I had their call numbers, piece of cake. Maybe I could even sit and do some work until Ase picked me up.

“You can’t bring that in here,” the security guard at the front desk announced, indicated my small backpack.

I’d love to have seen the stupid look on my face. ‘I can’t bring books into the library?” I asked, unable to restrain myself a second longer.

“Yes, books, but not the bag,” she replied. I could see this was going nowhere fast. I wasn’t about to go sit and leave my bag with its paperwork and books from the office and so on sitting behind that desk. “Don’t you have a car [to put it in]?” she asked accusingly.

Of course, I’m white, I have a car. “No, I don’t,” I replied. She didn’t believe me. I was in the process of signing in and took out my rubbery new ID to fill in the box for “ID number.”

“Why didn’t you tell us you were staff? You don’t have to fill that out,” she exclaimed. I had actually first asked if they needed to see my ID. Though staff standing is apparently not considered insurance against stealing, because I still had to leave my bag.

I took my wallet out and ran upstairs to find the books. No problem. Back down to check them out. The computer beeped as a woman with sharpened rot-brown teeth looked up at me. “Ohhhhh….but you haven’t registered,” she said gravely.

You just need an ID to check out books, our librarian back in Maun had told me. “But I’m faculty, not a student,” I said, flashing my best stupid look for the second time.

“Nooooo, you’re new. So you need to register with the library to be able to take out books. You have to bring us a letter from the head of your department introducing you so we can register you.” She kept saying register like it involved a series of inoculations against overdue books and talking loudly in the stacks.

So I danced with her too, around and around. Why don’t you come back at 2 when my supervisor is back from lunch, maybe they can make an exception. I tried, can’t you just call the library up at the centre or something, what if they ask for the books, I’m only here for one day. And you have no idea how badly I want out.

Finally an idea crept from the defeated recesses of my brain. “What does this letter need to say, exactly?” I asked.

“It must be from your head of department, telling us your title, how long you will be working, if you are full-time, the details of your position,” she replied. Part of the reason that this was so funny is that my research centre isn’t a department. So I don’t really HAVE a head of department. But I had to admit, she was abashedly kind while not giving me what I wanted.

“Well,” I began, “I do have letters that say all of those things, but they aren’t written to the library.” I thought about the envelope in my bag that was full of letters for immigration, administration, payroll, academic affairs, medical services…

She brightened. “I think that might work!”

I went out front to retrieve my bag from security. I refused to empty it and give it back, but pointed rather obnoxiously instead. “I’m just going to walk RIGHT THERE to the counter and then come back. OK?” Though it wasn’t really a question.

The letters I produced did indeed do the trick. She entered me into the computer, and I answered her questions. I even gave her the expiration date of my contract. Apparently the letters needed to be seen, stamped and official-looking, but not actually referenced or kept. They greased the spinning wheels of our conversation, enough to make her comfortable with me just long enough for me to walk out with my letters, my three books, and my backpack.

While I’d stood at the counter waiting to be registered, I glanced at a newspaper folded and pushed up to the edge of the wall to my right. It displayed a prominent headline: “Poor service delivery a concern.” Fair enough. I just couldn’t imagine who had been reading it.

mopipi and sage in june

"Smell that?" my new boss asked as a sharp warm scent curled into the truck. It was familiar and obtrusive but I wasn't quite sure what it was. "Overgrazing around here has led to a total proliferation of sage bushes, and when you combine it with the stink of the tree that's everywhere, this is what you get. It's called a mo-pee-pee tree because, well, that's what it smells like," Larry explained, grinning behind silver-rimmed glasses and below a bald head with a sprinkling of stubborn gray sprouts.

I laughed. Urine and sage certainly would be a noticeable combination. We made a few quick stops in town, proceeded to the university centre, and then on to the home of some friends of Larry's, where he and handful of other expats played roller hockey on a full-size cement rink painted powder blue and white. I'm not kidding. It's called Mukwa Leaf Gardens (Larry is Canadian and originally from Windsor, near the home of the Toronto Maple Leafs). The fee is ten pula (about $1.66) to use the rink, which is a recent increase because, as the owner says, the hippo is hungry and has to be fed.

Greetings from Maun, Botswana, which is to be my home for the next year-and-some-months. For those of you who are unaware, I had a late-breaking opportunity to come here to the University of Botswana's Okavango Research Centre and run some research projects of my own design while postponing my job at the University of Massachusetts for a year, and I took it. So I am back in Africa, with all of the joys (warmth from people and the land, giraffes, sunsets) and obstacles (lost luggage, no contract, no work visa, no paycheck) that come with it. For the time being, as my boss will be away most of the next three months, I'm staying in his house on the river just outside of town and down the road from the small university centre. Once I have permission to come and go from Botswana, I'll be headed for Namibia to continue some work I started there a few years back and stay with my adopted Zimbabwean sister, where I'm told that I have already been assigned to be a member of her wedding planning committee. I have no idea what that means, but I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy it.

In the meantime, I assumed that while I am close to the tremendous biodiversity and wild landscape of the Okavango Delta (for a basic intro to the premiere safari destination of southern Africa, see http://www.okavango-delta.net/info.htm), I wouldn't actually be able to see it for some time. On Friday, however, I finagled an invitation to a community-run lodge in the Delta and spent the weekend with a South African tourism consultant and a Swedish communications coordinator for the World Conservation Union. So by Saturday night - two days after arriving here - I was sipping a Windhoek Lager and watching the sun go down over the main river channel thru the Delta. Taking a few photos, my rather antagonistic South African companion said, "The angle is really great from about ten meters further that way," indicating the water and finding himself to be quite hilarious. He was, of course, testing my fear of the crocodiles that are thick and often quite sneaky. I made sure to march much closer to the water than he had, took a few shots, and returned to my beer. "Did you think I wouldn't?" I asked him, smiling, a bit bolder (and certainly more foolish) than our Swedish friend who had only been here for a few months.